Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Writing under such conditions becomes no longer the act of clarifying thought, but mere stenography. It is debased even further by the pseudo-objective postures teachers frequently require their students to adopt--"This essay would like to analyze..." --as well as the sometimes well-meant but usually misshapen advice to "place the writer's thinking in the background," a suggestion students often disastrously take to heart...
...difficult to hate a gay classmate or neighbor than to hate gays in the abstract. But that fact works against the gay movement when the push for recognition, which must be public and general, strays from firm legislative ground. Publishing a literary magazine, for instance, allows visceral responses or pseudo-scientific psychological argument to cloud the basic issue--that of the rights of a minority group set off from society, like racial minorities, by factors other than will...
...back home. His cantankerous grandfather goes on living and seething beyond his time; a sister with "insufficient resistance to pain of every kind" opts for the lesser agony of suicide. The lonesome cowboy finds purpose only in pursuing Claire, the icy wife of a "vivid . . . piercey-bright, oilman feisty" pseudo-patrón named Tio. The result is McGuane's standard mano á mano struggle in which the prize is less significant than the battle itself...
...meditate simply and carefully on the complexity of life. Again leaping from one topic to the next, he exults in his sightings of animals while wondering if he will catch a glimpse of the fox and then considers what an ordeal solitude actually is, despite its perverse and mostly pseudo-intellectual glamour. Then he considers the differences of life in the city and the country (it is not exactly that life is slow but that "a cow is finally just a cow, a chore is after all a chore, there is small possibility of what is called in the city...
...luck. Many more Americans are now beginning to think seriously about what used to be called the unthinkable. Insofar as this new wave of concern and activism about the single biggest threat facing mankind does justice to the complexity of the problem, and steers clear of simple-minded pseudo solutions, it may foster some of the prerequisites for survival. In which case, so much the better...